Anxious People

The story flashes back to a session between Nadia and Zara. Zara tells Nadia that she’s picked up a new hobby of viewing “middle-class apartments” so that she can “fraternize with the most unfortunate members of society!” (92). She doesn’t tell Nadia that she’s been doing this for nearly 10 years to cope with her guilt: She feels responsible for the man on the bridge’s suicide.

Nadia asks Zara why she likes her job, and Zara says it’s because she’s an “analyst” as opposed to an “economist.” She differentiates between these two terms by saying that analysts always expect the worst and that’s why they always win. Before leaving the session, Zara asks Nadia if she believes that there are bad people in the world. Nadia says yes and then furthers her answer by saying that most people must make excuses when they make bad decisions because they can’t live with believing that they’re bad. Zara doesn’t say so aloud, but she believes that she’s a bad person. She carries around an unopened letter from the man who died by suicide, believing it to be a declaration of how bad she is.